A black suburban dispatched by MSNBC’s Morning Joe is idling outside best-selling author Anand Giridharadas’s Brooklyn apartment when I arrive just after dawn one morning in August. Giridharadas, dressed for TV in a pin-striped blazer and with a swoop of carefully styled hair, hops into a bucket seat and greets our driver by name as we glide down empty streets toward Rockefeller Center.
“I love it,” Giridharadas, 38, says of being on television, as we wait in a narrow greenroom before his 7 a.m. call time. An author and journalist, he first appeared on Morning Joe in 2015 after sparring on Twitter with the show’s cohost Joe Scarborough about the Trump campaign’s proposed Muslim ban. By the time Giridharadas’s 2018 book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, became a best seller, he had become somewhat of a regular. Being on the show “made me realize how few people I was reaching,” he says. “I just didn’t have a sense of the scale.” (He now has more than 520,000 Twitter followers.) The talking-head format favors big shows of personality over substantive debates about economics or politics. But joining the fray is worth it, he says, “to give millions of people a diluted version of my idea.”
